Artificial intelligence for better or for worse-ish (1)

From
Alec Cawley, Penwood, Berkshire, UK

Timothy Revell suggests that watchdogs could go through the code of an artificial intelligence “line by line” to understand the decisions it makes (14 April, p 40). But it isn’t the code that matters: it is the data set on which the code is trained. A classic example is the automatic tap which, trained on white hands, didn’t turn on for brown hands.

The idea of testing systems for bias by adjusting inputs and seeing if outputs change works only for factors you choose to test. If you don’t realise that short people literally have a different worldview, you …